Arguably, yes. And now we have the choice of buying the one song that's worth a damn for a buck, rather than $10-15 for a single song we like and 8-10 others that are pure crap.
So now, you can buy the individual song you like for 99 cents - even my *favorite* albums, I'd be hard pressed to say I love "every song on this album," so why focus on trying to help the record companies continue selling albums?
In a normal market, that would lead to lower prices.
For something that's a commodity, yes. Farmer Bob's corn is pretty much the same as Farmer John's corn. Saudi Arabia's oil is pretty much the same as Venezuela's oil. South African gold is pretty much the same as gold produced by Peru.
However, Metallica's CD is quite different from Britney Spears' CD. The entertainment industries will never produce "commodity" music - or let's hope they never do. As such, price is not the only determining factor in choosing the products, and in many cases, it's not even remotely a factor: if you offered me Lady Gaga's entire catalog for $1, I'd probably decline, because I simply don't dig her music. It's not something I'd be interested in listening to. In the same breath, offer me a copy of good-quality outtakes, unreleased songs, and other studio 'rarities' produced during recording sessions by Tool, Bruce Springsteen, or other artists I *like* for $20, and I'd probably hand over $20 on the spot.
When personal taste factors into the buying decision, you won't necessarily have an asymptotic approach to a price of $0, because people like what they like, and the existence of 10 million other records out there wouldn't make me miss Tool's "Undertow" or Springsteen's "Nebraska" any less, or replace those albums for me if I couldn't afford a copy of them.
You indicate that what you're saying is sarcasm, but it's not clear what you're being sarcastic about.
Is it that you think this program is a good thing? Is it that you think it's *not* socialism? Is it that you think the GP post is off-base for saying this is a dumb way to spend tax money?
Because frankly, it's hard to see where this is anything but a waste of tax money that serves no purpose other than shoveling French taxpayer's money into the pockets of music industry executives.
The problem is, reducing the prices to 1 pound (~$1.60 US) wouldn't do much to stop piracy - it still costs money, and pirated copies are still free. If the decision to pirate is an economic one, you won't do much to end it by reducing the price, even drastically, unless the price drops to "free". If it's not an economic decision, then you've done nothing to change the fundamental objection someone has to paying for music.
Let's be honest, 99 cents for a new song is not much of a barrier to impulse buys, if you already have a computer & an internet connection, and probably an mp3 player (or a phone that does that job) as well.
If you reduce the price of albums to near that level, you've pretty much guaranteed that what you'll end up with is the one hit single plus 8-10 other generic throwaway songs that nobody will ever care to listen to.
So you haven't read any of the news coverage about the Afghan War Diaries, including press statements Mr. Assange made, where he acknowledged releasing informant names, and then tried to blame the Pentagon for not scrubbing the data for him?
Pay attention to the news coverage, and then people might take your comments seriously.
It's not FUD. The first round of publication was rushed, and as such, contained names of informants. The article you linked was a full month after the initial publication of the Afghan War Diaries.
Other articles have cited Wikileaks insiders expressing concern to Assange over his decision to publicize the second round this month, with the major concern being that they would not have time to fully review the documents before publication.
That they offered access to the US government a month after they published a slew of documents does not absolve them of responsibility for what they have already published, nor absolve them of responsibility for continuing to publish documents that haven't been properly edited to reduce harm.
Please let me be clear here, too - I don't dispute their right to publish the documents. I simply dislike the rush to grab headlines with such facile disregard for the harm it could cause.
Yeah, whenever I see mention of it, I go there too... to read, "We are sorry, WikiLeaks is currently underoing scheduled maintenance. We will be back online as soon as possible. For status updates you can follow our twitter feed."
Been that way since Sept. 29 or 30. Maybe they'll just migrate to twitter entirely. 140-character leaks.
I hear that there's previously-unknown evidence of war crimes in the Afghan War Diaries, and that's why there was such a rush to publicize them without proper redaction and editing. PROVE to me that there is by citing the data with appropriate links, and I may feel otherwise, but for now, I believe they are just trying to drum up publicity to inflate Mr. Assange's ego.
It was only a big deal if you were drinking contaminated water - usually fecally contaminated, from a source *upstream* from you, i.e., a town or village or city dumping their sewage into the river. Stop being such a pussy, millions of people every day drink well water. If the well is properly drilled, there is NO need for "filtration" or "decontamination," unless you have a herd of deer or a bunch of homeless people living a couple hundred feet below ground, crapping in your aquifer.
The only thing you have to worry about with a good well is whether or not there's a high mineral content - which can stain your teeth, and impart a flavor to the water that may or may not be pleasant.
1) You couldn't install software on - not because it doesn't have a DVD drive, but because I said 'nah, i don't want you to do that,'; 2) Came with software preinstalled that I wouldn't allow you to uninstall,'; 3) Had 8GB of ram installed, but I would only let you use 4GB of that;
You may not consider it *seriously* crippled, but if you had to hack into that laptop, install a custom-built OS image, and a bunch of other software in order to take full advantage of the hardware you had just bought, why would you ever say that that's not 'crippled'? That's the very *definition* of crippled - "Deprived of strength or functionality."
Next, you'll be telling us that banks are "open" because you can break in and take your money out any time you want, you just need dynamite and guns to do it.
I'm not sure about that. If Google denied (some) control the the carriers, where else could they go?
They wouldn't have anywhere to go, which is *exactly* the point. The carriers have far too much control as it is. For all the talk of Android "opening things up," the average consumer has very little control over their device.
Apple has forced the carriers to cede some of that control to them ("We make the device, you're just the person operating the plumbing that gets data to it, and we'll make sure they don't do anything too crazy with it"), and Google is in a position where they could open it up even more, but instead they're just handing the OS over to the people building the phones, who are locking it down and customizing it as they see fit. The "openness" of Android has very little to do with the user.
Here's how you SHOULD be approaching it: 1) Gather requirements from your key stakeholders - the people who will use it daily, the people who will administer the systems, and the people who will write the checks to fund the effort. (users, admins, managers) - define the use cases the tool needs to support. 2) Survey the available solutions and generate a list of the top solutions that appear to satisfy your requirements - this is your list of tools to investigate. 3) If you have time, do a hands-on proof of concept with each, or at least try to get some time poking around the live system, perhaps with a vendor demo. 4) Evaluate the PoC's against your list of requirements, and also pay attention to usability, maintainability, support costs, licensing costs, reliability, and fault tolerance concerns. 5) Compare how each one fares across all categories, and decide which gives you better value for your dollar - in other words, which is the better investment for your company. 6) Purchase a copy of that tool, and implement a pilot. Try to get the vendor to provide you with additional support during your pilot phase, or at least free licenses until the system goes live. 7) Work out the bugs in the pilot, then roll it out across your company.
If Plone can't stand on its own merits against Confluence, then you are sacrificing your own professional credibility and the best interests of your company and users to push an ideological agenda, and you will (rightfully) earn the derision and scorn of the people you are supposed to be supporting. If Plone is a solid piece of software - I'm not suggesting it isn't, I'm just not familiar with it - then it will probably emerge the winner in an evaluation.
And to all the people saying "just tell them it's free," since when is the cost of licensing a major component of the overall cost of supporting the software over its lifetime? The "free" system might be less stable and require a lot more (or higher-cost) support personnel to keep it running, and you need to take that into account if you're going to ask your company to invest a lot of money, time and effort into rolling out a new business system like this.
Doesn't much mean anything to me, but a lot of the people who hang out on Slashdot crowing about how Android's "openness" makes it so much better than the iPhone, and then turn around to tell us how great their phone was *after* they rooted it are kind of funny to watch.
And considering the point was that the "open" android phones are being locked down and crippled by carriers, and he hastened to tell us how not-crippled his phone was after he rooted it...
Well, let's just say he's not making the point that he thought he was making.
I would hardly call this device crippled...in the least.
Yeah, after you rooted / jailbroke / hacked the device to get around the carrier's crippling restrictions, your phone runs great.
AFTER you rooted the device.
AFTER. you. rooted.
Why, pray tell, did you need to root it in the first place? After all, Android is an open OS, with all kinds of awesome built right in - why would you need to jailbreak to install new functionality... if it wasn't crippled in the first place?
Android's not doing at all badly compared to Apple's iOS, is it?
Not so far. But if it becomes hard for developers to turn a profit developing for Android due to fragmentation of the platform, you might see that turn around.
Consider - if I have to test on 3-4 devices, I can be pretty sure that what I release will function as I expect. If I have to test on 20, 30, 40 devices (different hardware, different screen sizes / resolutions, different hardware capabilities...) to get a pretty good cross-section of the android ecosystem, that adds time, cost (the devices aren't free), and coding effort to the development.
This *could* lead to: 1) Indie developers & small development shops being driven out of the app market due to rapidly eroding profit margins; 2) A rise in app prices to offset the cost of development and testing on so many different models; 3) Poor software quality because developers will test on their handset, and "just hope" it works on all the rest - dissatisfied customers are a lot less likely to spend a couple bucks on your software after a trial.
There are very real problems that could result if the fragmentation continues, and it's about SO much more than "3 buttons, software or hardware keyboard."
Consider what it's going to look like when all these Android Tablets hit the market, too - it won't be just phones, it'll be tablets too, and they're going to have different sizes & screen resolutions as well.
This is a problem, and one of the things that risks ruining Android's "openness" - it's open to the carriers, who have the money & staff to spend on locking your device down just the way they like it. It's open for the carriers, not the *vast majority* of consumers, who will take what the carriers offer, and form their impression based on that.
In many ways, the iOS vs. Android 'battle' isn't really a battle between Google & Apple, it's a battle between Apple's "the phone maker dictates the feature set" & the carriers' "the phone carrier dictates the feature set" models. If you're smart enough to know how to root your Android device, great; if you're smart enough to know how to root your Apple device, great; but neither of the platforms at this point is particularly "open" in terms of what the *consumer* can do with it.
Sure, you can have that expectation within your vehicle all you want. But the exterior of your car is not "private" space, therefore there can be no expectation of privacy on the exterior of your vehicle. This is where the device was placed (attached to a bottom exterior surface of the vehicle), and courts have upheld this principle on numerous occasions.
As far as tampering, you'd probably have to show that they did some damage to your vehicle by attaching the device in order to have a significant claim that they substantially affected your "material investment" or tampered with it somehow.
And frankly, you're attacking the wrong point: nobody's going to take away law enforcement's ability to attach a tracking device to someone's car for investigative purposes - the next step there is somebody saying "Law enforcement can't follow someone during the course of an investigation," and that's going to pretty much prevent law enforcement from doing part of their job.
You can and *should*, however, encourage politicians, judges, and other citizens to speak up in favor of keeping the police subject to judicial review when they want to attach this type of device - they should have to get a warrant signed by a judge, but they shouldn't have to get permission from the subject of the investigation.
I'm not sure what sort of muddled point you're making, honestly, but the thing you're simply ignoring is the fact that the FBI agents are granted authority beyond the authority of J. Random Individual.
This makes it quite legal for them to attach a device & collect this data during the course of the investigative process. Law enforcement has the power to compel you to do (some) things you would not do voluntarily, by virtue of the fact that they are law enforcement. The only real point at issue here is whether or not they should have to get a judge's signature on a warrant before they strap this device to the bottom of your car.
Really, this should be very simple. Get a warrant and you can attach whatever to whereever. No warrant, and you can't.
Agreed, there's a host of corner cases and "what if" questions the ruling raises. My opinion is in line with yours - tell the judge why you need it, get the warrant, place the device. It's not that onerous, and it places a judicial check on a power that could be abused by law enforcement.
Regardless of location tampering with cars is vandalism.
Not when the law gives law enforcement the ability to do so. Private citizens =/= law enforcement agents, in theory, and in fact.
Tracking someone's movements is a long-standing, and thoroughly legal, investigative technique. The only really questionable point here is whether or not law enforcement needs a warrant to place the device.
While judges have issued a different ruling, my opinion is that yes, law enforcement should be subject to judicial review for any sort of investigative technique, because it has the potential to be abused.
I don't object to tracking as long as appropriate cause is demonstrated before a judge - I do have a problem with them being able to apply it whenever and however they want, with no check on that power.
If you think I'm a liberal, you'd be sorely mistaken.
I noted it as interesting because it's not usual that you see a conservative (presumably Republican, since he was appointed to the bench by Pres. Reagan) judge issuing an opinion where he demonstrates concern for the *economic disparity* that the interpretation of the law will create, where rich people get privacy because they have the wherewithal to purchase a gate & fencing for their property, while poorer people won't be able to afford the accoutrements of privacy for their property. This line of reasoning is something I'd expect to see used by a far more liberally-inclined judge, and I found it interesting that it wasn't considered a compelling argument by the predominantly-liberal 9th circuit.
If you had a point, you might try making it, rather than simply spouting bumper sticker slogans. I suspect we might even agree on at least some of your opinions, though your method of engaging in a debate seems to leave a bit to be desired.
The problem is that to the court's thinking, there's no "expectation of privacy" in a driveway unless there's obvious effort that's been placed at excluding random passers-by: e.g., fencing, and a gate. The thinking being, "Well if you care about keeping your driveway private, you should have made an effort to make it so people can't access it."
The dissenting opinion (interestingly from a fairly conservative judge appointed by Reagan) actually cited the fact that this creates an economic imbalance - poor people can't afford gated driveways & fencing, rich people can.
A fairly thorough writeup can be found here. Interesting to note that that article also talks about a DC court recently deciding that extended GPS tracking requires a warrant - there's no clear precedent, and so it's very likely that this will end up in one form or another before the Supreme Court.
Slashdot Mirror
Arguably, yes. And now we have the choice of buying the one song that's worth a damn for a buck, rather than $10-15 for a single song we like and 8-10 others that are pure crap.
So now, you can buy the individual song you like for 99 cents - even my *favorite* albums, I'd be hard pressed to say I love "every song on this album," so why focus on trying to help the record companies continue selling albums?
For something that's a commodity, yes. Farmer Bob's corn is pretty much the same as Farmer John's corn. Saudi Arabia's oil is pretty much the same as Venezuela's oil. South African gold is pretty much the same as gold produced by Peru.
However, Metallica's CD is quite different from Britney Spears' CD. The entertainment industries will never produce "commodity" music - or let's hope they never do. As such, price is not the only determining factor in choosing the products, and in many cases, it's not even remotely a factor: if you offered me Lady Gaga's entire catalog for $1, I'd probably decline, because I simply don't dig her music. It's not something I'd be interested in listening to. In the same breath, offer me a copy of good-quality outtakes, unreleased songs, and other studio 'rarities' produced during recording sessions by Tool, Bruce Springsteen, or other artists I *like* for $20, and I'd probably hand over $20 on the spot.
When personal taste factors into the buying decision, you won't necessarily have an asymptotic approach to a price of $0, because people like what they like, and the existence of 10 million other records out there wouldn't make me miss Tool's "Undertow" or Springsteen's "Nebraska" any less, or replace those albums for me if I couldn't afford a copy of them.
Can it be carrot cake?
Oh good, just what we need. More shitty electronica from DJ Neckbeard, released under Creative Commons.
You indicate that what you're saying is sarcasm, but it's not clear what you're being sarcastic about.
Is it that you think this program is a good thing? Is it that you think it's *not* socialism? Is it that you think the GP post is off-base for saying this is a dumb way to spend tax money?
Because frankly, it's hard to see where this is anything but a waste of tax money that serves no purpose other than shoveling French taxpayer's money into the pockets of music industry executives.
The problem is, reducing the prices to 1 pound (~$1.60 US) wouldn't do much to stop piracy - it still costs money, and pirated copies are still free. If the decision to pirate is an economic one, you won't do much to end it by reducing the price, even drastically, unless the price drops to "free". If it's not an economic decision, then you've done nothing to change the fundamental objection someone has to paying for music.
Let's be honest, 99 cents for a new song is not much of a barrier to impulse buys, if you already have a computer & an internet connection, and probably an mp3 player (or a phone that does that job) as well.
If you reduce the price of albums to near that level, you've pretty much guaranteed that what you'll end up with is the one hit single plus 8-10 other generic throwaway songs that nobody will ever care to listen to.
So you haven't read any of the news coverage about the Afghan War Diaries, including press statements Mr. Assange made, where he acknowledged releasing informant names, and then tried to blame the Pentagon for not scrubbing the data for him?
Pay attention to the news coverage, and then people might take your comments seriously.
It's not FUD. The first round of publication was rushed, and as such, contained names of informants. The article you linked was a full month after the initial publication of the Afghan War Diaries.
Other articles have cited Wikileaks insiders expressing concern to Assange over his decision to publicize the second round this month, with the major concern being that they would not have time to fully review the documents before publication.
That they offered access to the US government a month after they published a slew of documents does not absolve them of responsibility for what they have already published, nor absolve them of responsibility for continuing to publish documents that haven't been properly edited to reduce harm.
Please let me be clear here, too - I don't dispute their right to publish the documents. I simply dislike the rush to grab headlines with such facile disregard for the harm it could cause.
Yeah, whenever I see mention of it, I go there too... to read, "We are sorry, WikiLeaks is currently underoing scheduled maintenance. We will be back online as soon as possible. For status updates you can follow our twitter feed."
Been that way since Sept. 29 or 30. Maybe they'll just migrate to twitter entirely. 140-character leaks.
I hear that there's previously-unknown evidence of war crimes in the Afghan War Diaries, and that's why there was such a rush to publicize them without proper redaction and editing. PROVE to me that there is by citing the data with appropriate links, and I may feel otherwise, but for now, I believe they are just trying to drum up publicity to inflate Mr. Assange's ego.
Hey! That was fun! Now, you go again!
It was only a big deal if you were drinking contaminated water - usually fecally contaminated, from a source *upstream* from you, i.e., a town or village or city dumping their sewage into the river. Stop being such a pussy, millions of people every day drink well water. If the well is properly drilled, there is NO need for "filtration" or "decontamination," unless you have a herd of deer or a bunch of homeless people living a couple hundred feet below ground, crapping in your aquifer.
The only thing you have to worry about with a good well is whether or not there's a high mineral content - which can stain your teeth, and impart a flavor to the water that may or may not be pleasant.
If you bought a laptop which:
1) You couldn't install software on - not because it doesn't have a DVD drive, but because I said 'nah, i don't want you to do that,';
2) Came with software preinstalled that I wouldn't allow you to uninstall,';
3) Had 8GB of ram installed, but I would only let you use 4GB of that;
You may not consider it *seriously* crippled, but if you had to hack into that laptop, install a custom-built OS image, and a bunch of other software in order to take full advantage of the hardware you had just bought, why would you ever say that that's not 'crippled'? That's the very *definition* of crippled - "Deprived of strength or functionality."
Next, you'll be telling us that banks are "open" because you can break in and take your money out any time you want, you just need dynamite and guns to do it.
They wouldn't have anywhere to go, which is *exactly* the point. The carriers have far too much control as it is. For all the talk of Android "opening things up," the average consumer has very little control over their device.
Apple has forced the carriers to cede some of that control to them ("We make the device, you're just the person operating the plumbing that gets data to it, and we'll make sure they don't do anything too crazy with it"), and Google is in a position where they could open it up even more, but instead they're just handing the OS over to the people building the phones, who are locking it down and customizing it as they see fit. The "openness" of Android has very little to do with the user.
Here's how you SHOULD be approaching it:
1) Gather requirements from your key stakeholders - the people who will use it daily, the people who will administer the systems, and the people who will write the checks to fund the effort. (users, admins, managers) - define the use cases the tool needs to support.
2) Survey the available solutions and generate a list of the top solutions that appear to satisfy your requirements - this is your list of tools to investigate.
3) If you have time, do a hands-on proof of concept with each, or at least try to get some time poking around the live system, perhaps with a vendor demo.
4) Evaluate the PoC's against your list of requirements, and also pay attention to usability, maintainability, support costs, licensing costs, reliability, and fault tolerance concerns.
5) Compare how each one fares across all categories, and decide which gives you better value for your dollar - in other words, which is the better investment for your company.
6) Purchase a copy of that tool, and implement a pilot. Try to get the vendor to provide you with additional support during your pilot phase, or at least free licenses until the system goes live.
7) Work out the bugs in the pilot, then roll it out across your company.
If Plone can't stand on its own merits against Confluence, then you are sacrificing your own professional credibility and the best interests of your company and users to push an ideological agenda, and you will (rightfully) earn the derision and scorn of the people you are supposed to be supporting. If Plone is a solid piece of software - I'm not suggesting it isn't, I'm just not familiar with it - then it will probably emerge the winner in an evaluation.
And to all the people saying "just tell them it's free," since when is the cost of licensing a major component of the overall cost of supporting the software over its lifetime? The "free" system might be less stable and require a lot more (or higher-cost) support personnel to keep it running, and you need to take that into account if you're going to ask your company to invest a lot of money, time and effort into rolling out a new business system like this.
Doesn't much mean anything to me, but a lot of the people who hang out on Slashdot crowing about how Android's "openness" makes it so much better than the iPhone, and then turn around to tell us how great their phone was *after* they rooted it are kind of funny to watch.
And considering the point was that the "open" android phones are being locked down and crippled by carriers, and he hastened to tell us how not-crippled his phone was after he rooted it...
Well, let's just say he's not making the point that he thought he was making.
Yeah, after you rooted / jailbroke / hacked the device to get around the carrier's crippling restrictions, your phone runs great.
AFTER you rooted the device.
AFTER. you. rooted.
Why, pray tell, did you need to root it in the first place? After all, Android is an open OS, with all kinds of awesome built right in - why would you need to jailbreak to install new functionality... if it wasn't crippled in the first place?
Not so far. But if it becomes hard for developers to turn a profit developing for Android due to fragmentation of the platform, you might see that turn around.
Consider - if I have to test on 3-4 devices, I can be pretty sure that what I release will function as I expect. If I have to test on 20, 30, 40 devices (different hardware, different screen sizes / resolutions, different hardware capabilities...) to get a pretty good cross-section of the android ecosystem, that adds time, cost (the devices aren't free), and coding effort to the development.
This *could* lead to:
1) Indie developers & small development shops being driven out of the app market due to rapidly eroding profit margins;
2) A rise in app prices to offset the cost of development and testing on so many different models;
3) Poor software quality because developers will test on their handset, and "just hope" it works on all the rest - dissatisfied customers are a lot less likely to spend a couple bucks on your software after a trial.
There are very real problems that could result if the fragmentation continues, and it's about SO much more than "3 buttons, software or hardware keyboard."
Consider what it's going to look like when all these Android Tablets hit the market, too - it won't be just phones, it'll be tablets too, and they're going to have different sizes & screen resolutions as well.
This is a problem, and one of the things that risks ruining Android's "openness" - it's open to the carriers, who have the money & staff to spend on locking your device down just the way they like it. It's open for the carriers, not the *vast majority* of consumers, who will take what the carriers offer, and form their impression based on that.
In many ways, the iOS vs. Android 'battle' isn't really a battle between Google & Apple, it's a battle between Apple's "the phone maker dictates the feature set" & the carriers' "the phone carrier dictates the feature set" models. If you're smart enough to know how to root your Android device, great; if you're smart enough to know how to root your Apple device, great; but neither of the platforms at this point is particularly "open" in terms of what the *consumer* can do with it.
Sure, you can have that expectation within your vehicle all you want. But the exterior of your car is not "private" space, therefore there can be no expectation of privacy on the exterior of your vehicle. This is where the device was placed (attached to a bottom exterior surface of the vehicle), and courts have upheld this principle on numerous occasions.
As far as tampering, you'd probably have to show that they did some damage to your vehicle by attaching the device in order to have a significant claim that they substantially affected your "material investment" or tampered with it somehow.
And frankly, you're attacking the wrong point: nobody's going to take away law enforcement's ability to attach a tracking device to someone's car for investigative purposes - the next step there is somebody saying "Law enforcement can't follow someone during the course of an investigation," and that's going to pretty much prevent law enforcement from doing part of their job.
You can and *should*, however, encourage politicians, judges, and other citizens to speak up in favor of keeping the police subject to judicial review when they want to attach this type of device - they should have to get a warrant signed by a judge, but they shouldn't have to get permission from the subject of the investigation.
I'm not sure what sort of muddled point you're making, honestly, but the thing you're simply ignoring is the fact that the FBI agents are granted authority beyond the authority of J. Random Individual.
This makes it quite legal for them to attach a device & collect this data during the course of the investigative process. Law enforcement has the power to compel you to do (some) things you would not do voluntarily, by virtue of the fact that they are law enforcement. The only real point at issue here is whether or not they should have to get a judge's signature on a warrant before they strap this device to the bottom of your car.
Agreed, there's a host of corner cases and "what if" questions the ruling raises. My opinion is in line with yours - tell the judge why you need it, get the warrant, place the device. It's not that onerous, and it places a judicial check on a power that could be abused by law enforcement.
Not when the law gives law enforcement the ability to do so. Private citizens =/= law enforcement agents, in theory, and in fact.
Tracking someone's movements is a long-standing, and thoroughly legal, investigative technique. The only really questionable point here is whether or not law enforcement needs a warrant to place the device.
While judges have issued a different ruling, my opinion is that yes, law enforcement should be subject to judicial review for any sort of investigative technique, because it has the potential to be abused.
I don't object to tracking as long as appropriate cause is demonstrated before a judge - I do have a problem with them being able to apply it whenever and however they want, with no check on that power.
If you think I'm a liberal, you'd be sorely mistaken.
I noted it as interesting because it's not usual that you see a conservative (presumably Republican, since he was appointed to the bench by Pres. Reagan) judge issuing an opinion where he demonstrates concern for the *economic disparity* that the interpretation of the law will create, where rich people get privacy because they have the wherewithal to purchase a gate & fencing for their property, while poorer people won't be able to afford the accoutrements of privacy for their property. This line of reasoning is something I'd expect to see used by a far more liberally-inclined judge, and I found it interesting that it wasn't considered a compelling argument by the predominantly-liberal 9th circuit.
If you had a point, you might try making it, rather than simply spouting bumper sticker slogans. I suspect we might even agree on at least some of your opinions, though your method of engaging in a debate seems to leave a bit to be desired.
Not when the courts & the legislature have specifically granted the FBI & other law enforcement agencies the right to do so.
The problem is that to the court's thinking, there's no "expectation of privacy" in a driveway unless there's obvious effort that's been placed at excluding random passers-by: e.g., fencing, and a gate. The thinking being, "Well if you care about keeping your driveway private, you should have made an effort to make it so people can't access it."
The dissenting opinion (interestingly from a fairly conservative judge appointed by Reagan) actually cited the fact that this creates an economic imbalance - poor people can't afford gated driveways & fencing, rich people can.
A fairly thorough writeup can be found here. Interesting to note that that article also talks about a DC court recently deciding that extended GPS tracking requires a warrant - there's no clear precedent, and so it's very likely that this will end up in one form or another before the Supreme Court.